Is Learning To Code Really That Important?

This is a guest post by Borja Garcia de Vinuesa, Head of International Business Development at Ironhack.

At Ironhack, we hear about new ideas that come to life and revolutionize a market or industry almost every day. What is behind these new products? Is there any trait shared by all of them? There certainly is!

Being on-line 24/7 gives us the advantage of expanding the pool of available services, changes the way we communicate, and brings together two worlds that were not connected until now: the physical and the online world.

From booking your home cleaning online to making that same home smarter, everything passes through a new universal language: programming. Every digital application has been programmed. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the new app that makes your life marginally easier or the great new product that dramatically changes the way we live our lives. At the end of the day, all these new life changes have something in common: they are programmed.

The skills demanded of workers 10 years ago were very different from the ones demanded today. Yesterday, people were making material things. Nowadays, we are still building all these products that enhance our lives. However, we have moved from having people as the pillars for building everything to having machines that take humans out of the physical process of building. We are now focusing on improving these processes through automation.

So, what is today’s building process? Programming is now involved in any process of building something. We are rapidly moving towards a society where there is an increasingly reduced physical labor force. We now automate, design, and program. Before, we thought that programming was only for programmers. That is no longer true. Anyone can apply programming skills to their area of expertise. Everything can be changed, improved and re-designed.

Looking at the Spanish workforce itself. While the youth unemployment rate is almost 60%, there is near 0% unemployment for IT related positions. From fast growing startups to stable corporations, all of them have a hard time finding professionals that fit their needs. The market evolves and changes so fast that they have to be flexible and agile enough to meet the customer’s needs. That implies using technologies that benefit from agile methodologies and can keep the pace with the rapid changes. The problem with this is that these technologies are not learned in traditional educational institutions, and the few programs offered are not updated as fast as what the market demands. Until now, this gap had not been covered and self-learning was the only option. People have invested years in their education, but not everyone has the time to pick up a whole new programming language and be professionally prepared. This is where Ironhack comes into action.

Ironhack is an intensive 8 week program where participants learn the fundamentals of a Web Development (iOS Development is also available) with real professionals as teachers and mentors. The program covers the most up to date technologies and frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML & CSS, Testing, Git) used by top tech companies. These technologies cannot be understood from a theoretical perspective, so students learn by doing. They spend 6 weeks learning from the best developers in the country from companies such as Spotify, Tuenti, Ebay, Mozilla Firefox, and more. During the last two weeks, they build a web app from scratch.

We have partnerships with top tech employers who are interested in recruiting talent after they complete the course. However, the bootcamp is not only for people who want to work full-time as developers. Some of our students are entrepreneurs who have the desire to acquire the skills in order to be able to build their own product prototypes (Decorissimo, ePolitic).

At the end, everyone learning to code makes an impact. They can be hired and be part of a great team that builds useful products. They might choose their own path, serving some of us with new initiatives. Coders have the ability to impact people’s lives. That is important.

If you’re interested in finding about more about Ironhack events in Barcelona you can check them out here or contact the team by email referencing Barcinno in the subject.

About Stewart Masters

Stewart Masters is a Co-founder and Contributing Editor at Barcinno where he attempts (albeit pretty unsuccessfully) to write about local startups and his lessons learned as an entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder @Clubkviar, a leading online reservations service for top restaurants in Europe. You can follow him here @Stewartdmasters or +StewartMasters